Programming Concepts Taught by
Programming Concept
Object oriented development
How the Concept is Used in GameSalad
GameSalad Actors have the concept of inheritance, prototypes, and
instances.
Using Rules and Behaviors, GameSalad teaches the fundamentals of
Event Driven Programming, which is the dominant programming par-
Event Driven Programming
adigm used in games, graphical user interface (GUI) applications, and
many otvher applications, such as Javascript web applications. Many
other programming tools focus only on functional programming.
GameSalad Actors and Scenes have Attributes, which are essentially
Variables
variables. Attributes in GameSalad have different types, including
boolean, integer, real, image, and text. Access to attributes is controlled by scoping rules and encapsulation.
Functions
Trigonometric math, angles,
rotation
GameSalad’s Behaviors are effectively functions that can be called
again and again, passing different arguments into the call as needed.
Actors can interact with each other based on distances, angles,
velocities, and forces. The Expression Editor features mathematical
functions such as sin, tan, cos, abs to allow complex computations.
GameSalad’s Rules allow the use of comparison operators like
Comparison Operators
equals, less than, greater than, less than or equal, greater than or
equal and, not equal to evaluate expressions.
Conditional execution (if/then/
Using Rule Groups, GameSalad teaches users how code can be exe-
else)
cuted selectively based on conditions.
Data structures & data-driven
design
Looping
Physics & Simulation
GameSalad Tables are effectively multidimensional arrays, which
teaches users how to store data more efficiently and the importance
of developing a program independently of data (i.e., not hardcoding).
Teaches the concept of looping over a set of instructions until a given
condition is reached.
GameSalad includes a fully integrated 2D physics engine and all
Actors have physical Attributes that can be modified as needed.
GameSalad has expression functions that help teach how to concat-
String Manipulation
enate and manipulate strings, a key element of programming in any
language.